Zamu's Place : Tarde Venientibus Ossa
All good things begin with the knowing of names. And Zamu’s Place, for a place, we knew that had Irani/Parsi antecedents, had us pretty confident that it was named after Zamu and that he was some guy, probably the owner, who was loved sufficiently enough by his family and friends to have his name abbreviated into the Zamu we know today. Maybe someone even, who, after a long day of managing the culinary extravaganza that is Zamu’s Place from the counter, would go back to his friends for a game of Carrom while sipping on his orange juice, waiting for Sanjay Dutt to mouth some stupid inanity as Munnabhai. Thus, we were quite surprised, and pleasantly so, that ZaMu was actually a coming together of two names, Zal and Murad, the two sons of the man, Daraius Cursetjee who began this restaurant. The other word in the name is Place. This relatively innocuous word also has deep significance for this restaurant as it is, we learned, an oft forgotten and ignored part of the restaurant name wherein this generation’s obsession with shortening shit for textual purposes sees it becoming only Zamu’s. The truth though is that Place as a word is a nice tie-in to the history of this restaurant which links it to Touché, the Place, where Murad’s dad was once a partner.
According to a few internet and real-world sources, apparently Touché, the Place is the restaurant charged with the honor of pioneering the type of food known as the Sizzler. The partnership ended in the way partnerships sometimes end, and Daraius, within an agreement about these things, decided to open up a restaurant in a completely different place from Touché, the Place with the only menu that he knew, which was meat-centric just like the place he had left. Thus, was born Zamu’s Place. An interesting aside here is that all of this happened in a time when, a restaurant on Dhole Patil Road was considered a whole different place from Camp, which should help to indicate how small and how not widespread Pune as a city was.
Now before we got around to our lunch with Murad and Niharika, who were super cool hosts to us, let us give you the lowdown on what this restaurant feels like. It has, as you enter, an indoor section and an outdoor section. The outdoor section seems French café-ish with the semi-intricately designed white wrought iron chairs and humble tables where you’d imagine a couple of old couples sitting and reminiscing about the days gone by or maybe a group of youngsters romanticizing sutta and its subsequent throat soot. Perhaps, a better street view would allow it to be a hip sort of café where you might see people tap into their inner Ernest Hemingway, to just be there all day, nursing coffees and cigarettes and hangovers. The indoor section though, doesn’t need any help and it reminded Abbas of a place in Goa, a place in Bangalore, a place in France and a place near Harvard Square all at the same time. Its L-shaped construct is airy and has plenty of natural lighting and could pass muster as any sort of restaurant but we have to say that it works brilliantly as a sizzler place. Let us explain. Most of the other sizzler places we have been to are dark, bordering on dingy places (like permit rooms almost) which are mostly indoors with the AC working overtime to remove the smell of BBQ, which like humankind seems to taint everything that it encounters. Zamu’s Place on the other hand is cheery. It seems like a place you might wander in and find someone who knows you or who you know. In girl terms, and all restaurants have to be seen in girl terms, Zamu’s Place is that nice girl in college who everyone likes and who won’t make you feel like you are a little too awkward for the scene at hand, even though you quite frankly might be. Plus she’s not just pretty but smart too and has interesting hobbies as is evident from all the cool, sometimes quirky, sometimes retro art on the walls. She has sides to her, in a manner of speaking. One of those sides relates to the quite interesting manager and self-professed slave to the beats, and all around nice guy, Hoshang Irani. Some managers have that ‘born asshole’ vibe to them but Hoshang doesn’t have that. In fact, he seems the sort who might, if you talk to him, point you in the direction of interesting, unknown things to do in Pune while soundtracking the entire conversation with music that might be a little more upbeat than you want.
There is a vibe here that’s nice, and we do mean talcum powder nice, because it isn’t hard to imagine it as a place when full, bustling with the sounds of diners who are just happy, in a place that isn’t an imposition on any of their senses. It also feels like it won’t be a place that’ll attract the sort of crowd that is pretentious or preppy for the sake of being preppy and talking in chutiya, faux accents while air kissing the ozone layer out of environments. In fact, while we were sitting around during our lazy conversation with the owners, we saw Zal, Murad’s mom, and even Murad’s kid waft in and around the restaurant. They all dropped in to say hi, and it was heartening to see that the restaurant wasn’t just a workplace but rather had the nature of being the cynosure of the lives of this family which explains so much about the overall ethos of this place and the way they approach it. Take for example, the fact that Murad and Zal have stayed away from hard liquor licenses for Zamu’s Place even though, anyone with a shred of brain left over from even a Zombie Apocalypse will tell you that liquor means get rich quicker. They’ve stayed away from that license because they know that they will lose something quite valuable in what Zamu’s Place will then come to represent for their loyal customers but far more importantly, they know what people guzzling hard daaru at their restaurant will come to represent for themselves. In this day and age, of people stooping all the time to conquer, that was just about the most brilliant thing that was served up on that warm day.
So anyway, we get seated and we’re soon joined by Niharika and Murad Cursetjee, who along with Zal Cursetjee, creator of a few magnificent dishes at ZP (also hoster of great pub quizzes and cockblocker of Pranav’s eagerness to answer at these aforementioned pub quizzes), are the owners of this fine establishment. We were a bit concerned about Murad because he came in all serious with nearly a scowl on his face, almost as if he wasn’t convinced of who the hell we were [and rightly so because who the hell are we? (not speaking existentially, of course)] and why he needed to step out in that godawful sun to meet us. We did empathize because it was fucking hot and we were glad for the beers that soon made their way out to the table. Eventually Murad relaxed, as did everyone, but not before he told us, with a glint that was a mixture of pride and affection about some of the history of Zamu’s Place including how this place started in 1988 and how they still retained some of the original menu with some of the classics, like the shashliks, the garlic mushrooms, the pork chops and that monstrous thing of eclectic meaty beauty called the Mixed Grill.
With Murad now in his element, we were soon having the conversations we wanted to have with Niharika and him including the one which spoke about the new sort of entitled guest that comes to restaurants as if God himself came down, and around a burning bush, ordained this new guest to go forth to restaurants with commandments to correct their ways or face the food prophet’s wrath on Zomato, or on food groups. The way they handle this sort, if you might like to know, is with some of the famous Parsi humor where they try and accommodate the guest as best as they can but if someone is being a grade A asshole, they read the riot act to him. We, also spoke, intermittently, about ZP’s future plans and Abbas noticed Niharika was handling this bit of the conversation, and we wondered at a later time, if she was bringing some North-East Indian (she hails from Assam even though she insists that she’s from everywhere) fire to the table through Bhoot Jholokia, that little bit of chilli that has in literal and in post meal terms set fire to the Puneri restaurant scene.
We’re now ordering the starters and because it was Pranav’s first time at Zamu’s Place, we order most of the classics. The no-brainer choices are the garlic mushrooms and the surf and turf inspired Bacon Wrapped Prawns. There’s also a deep fried beef starter which Niharika suggested we should get and who are we to take opposing ideological stands about deep fried beefness that the pretty owner of a restaurant is suggesting? The food came and it complemented the beer and the conversation and it was perfect. Starters, beer and conversation went on for an hour or so and we were reluctant when first reminded that we need to get around to the mains.
But herein began the fun, because the three of the elder sorts insisted that the Zamu’s Place debutant, Pranav get a sizzler since this was his first time. Like most stories revolving around people losing their virginities, things got awkward when Pranav, who wasn’t really in Sizzler mode, did a hotchpotch of his ordering so as to get pork ribs, mashed potatoes, grilled tomatoes and, hold your breath, noodles. The dead denizens of quite a few culinary cultures may have done some serious grave rolling by the time Pranav was done ordering. But in Pranav’s defence, he felt immensely pressurized. Almost on a mom-is-standing-right-behind-you-while-you-open-the-website-to-check-your-engineering-results level. Quite as expected, Pranav succumbs to panic and messes up the order in the same way you tell your mom that you passed all but one paper when the reality is quite the polar opposite.
Abbas, on the other hand, ordered the Scandinavian Beef Rolls because the summer heat had a gun to his head about ordering any form of sizzlers.
When the food arrived, it was as expected, glorious. First let’s talk about Pranav’s sizzler, because that should have been a disaster but as soon as we saw that big chunk of meat, we knew that the meat on that plate would be the equivalent of a Clint Eastwood in a film. It would not say much and it would sneer a lot, but by all the ancient Gods, it would be brilliant. The mashed potatoes looked adept at being mashed and being potato-ey and the noodles seemed as if there was an infusion of something Asian just to keep certain demographics happy and even though you knew it would be wrong in terms of combinations, how wrong can you really go with meat and potatoes and fucking noodles? Coming to Abbas’ end of things, his Scandinavian beef rolls were beautiful and although we were expecting something Viking in proportions, we were pleasantly surprised when we got actual rolls covered in a sauce that was just creamy magnificence. The meat under the sauce was not an afterthought in terms of cooking and consisted of a roll made of a beef mince that still had a little bit of the grit on it, which Abbas quite liked. Honestly though, that sauce could have quite literally have covered anything, even the sins of the world without batting an eyelid. The Scandinavian Beef Rolls also have within them, a bit of an inside joke to them, in the form of small slivers of Jalapeno peppers which give to the bite, an infusion of “What the fu…” simply because it is so pleasing in the nuanced change of flavor in the form of the lovely fresh tartness it imparts into the heaviness of the meat. Zal apparently is the guy responsible for this dish and mad props for churning out such a winner.
This restaurant is about the honesty of big, bold flavors that will grip you by the shoulders and shout in your face, “Keep your fucking flimflam delicate slicings of meat at home. This is not the place for it”. This is caveman style meat servings for people who love meat. This is why Zamu’s Place is important for Pune because after we are done with our new age dining and our molecular gastronomy and our amuse-bouches, we still need places where we can come back and practice the fine art of ripping beautifully cooked meat from bones with our hands, in a location that won’t eye roll and do the tch tch on you.
It would be hard to sit in Dhole Patil road and not talk about Vohuman because in Irani/Persian/Parsi terms, ZP and Vohuman are a bunch of contrasts. While people may mentally, textually and verbally jack off to the very utterance of, Vohuman, and claim that they had their best early morning foodgasms at this place and how important Vohuman is to the eating out fabric of Pune, it never really came across anywhere close to that because apart from the old man, it really had nothing going for it, and perhaps it is our failing that old men just do not do it for us.
Abbas: Zamu’s Place though has that almost ethereal quality to it which seems to make me love it more everytime I go there, because even though it is old, it doesn’t show its age and does not demand respect and importance as a result of just being antiquated. It seems to be quite comfortable as a modern restaurant too and it embraces modernity not with a scowl and foul language like the old tend to, but rather with a sense of sangfroid which is just so awesome.
Pranav: It’s almost as if Vohuman is Maanas Shah’s 200 Rupee Beer post while Zamu’s Place is the thousands of liters of beer drunk all over at more than MRP prices with nary a mention. Like Vohuman is the lead guitarist of a band while Zamu’s Place is the drummer. Like Vohuman is, if I may, Sachin Tendulkar while Zamu’s Place is Rahul Dravid.
This ignorance of Zamu's Place in the big, bad scheme of things with regards to restaurants is kind of sad but it helps to reiterate our belief that most Punekars can’t get their heads out of their missal-ed asses and recognize a good thing even if it has been right there, staring at them in the face for nearly thirty years. Perhaps there is an answer there somewhere in the dichotomy of what is culturally profound for a particular city in a particular time and what is not, and perhaps the sexiest thing about Zamu’s Place is that it provides a place and an ambience that might permit these ruminations amongst other more straightforward and vastly more pleasurable things like well cooked meat and chilled beer at near perfect price points.
According to a few internet and real-world sources, apparently Touché, the Place is the restaurant charged with the honor of pioneering the type of food known as the Sizzler. The partnership ended in the way partnerships sometimes end, and Daraius, within an agreement about these things, decided to open up a restaurant in a completely different place from Touché, the Place with the only menu that he knew, which was meat-centric just like the place he had left. Thus, was born Zamu’s Place. An interesting aside here is that all of this happened in a time when, a restaurant on Dhole Patil Road was considered a whole different place from Camp, which should help to indicate how small and how not widespread Pune as a city was.
Now before we got around to our lunch with Murad and Niharika, who were super cool hosts to us, let us give you the lowdown on what this restaurant feels like. It has, as you enter, an indoor section and an outdoor section. The outdoor section seems French café-ish with the semi-intricately designed white wrought iron chairs and humble tables where you’d imagine a couple of old couples sitting and reminiscing about the days gone by or maybe a group of youngsters romanticizing sutta and its subsequent throat soot. Perhaps, a better street view would allow it to be a hip sort of café where you might see people tap into their inner Ernest Hemingway, to just be there all day, nursing coffees and cigarettes and hangovers. The indoor section though, doesn’t need any help and it reminded Abbas of a place in Goa, a place in Bangalore, a place in France and a place near Harvard Square all at the same time. Its L-shaped construct is airy and has plenty of natural lighting and could pass muster as any sort of restaurant but we have to say that it works brilliantly as a sizzler place. Let us explain. Most of the other sizzler places we have been to are dark, bordering on dingy places (like permit rooms almost) which are mostly indoors with the AC working overtime to remove the smell of BBQ, which like humankind seems to taint everything that it encounters. Zamu’s Place on the other hand is cheery. It seems like a place you might wander in and find someone who knows you or who you know. In girl terms, and all restaurants have to be seen in girl terms, Zamu’s Place is that nice girl in college who everyone likes and who won’t make you feel like you are a little too awkward for the scene at hand, even though you quite frankly might be. Plus she’s not just pretty but smart too and has interesting hobbies as is evident from all the cool, sometimes quirky, sometimes retro art on the walls. She has sides to her, in a manner of speaking. One of those sides relates to the quite interesting manager and self-professed slave to the beats, and all around nice guy, Hoshang Irani. Some managers have that ‘born asshole’ vibe to them but Hoshang doesn’t have that. In fact, he seems the sort who might, if you talk to him, point you in the direction of interesting, unknown things to do in Pune while soundtracking the entire conversation with music that might be a little more upbeat than you want.
There is a vibe here that’s nice, and we do mean talcum powder nice, because it isn’t hard to imagine it as a place when full, bustling with the sounds of diners who are just happy, in a place that isn’t an imposition on any of their senses. It also feels like it won’t be a place that’ll attract the sort of crowd that is pretentious or preppy for the sake of being preppy and talking in chutiya, faux accents while air kissing the ozone layer out of environments. In fact, while we were sitting around during our lazy conversation with the owners, we saw Zal, Murad’s mom, and even Murad’s kid waft in and around the restaurant. They all dropped in to say hi, and it was heartening to see that the restaurant wasn’t just a workplace but rather had the nature of being the cynosure of the lives of this family which explains so much about the overall ethos of this place and the way they approach it. Take for example, the fact that Murad and Zal have stayed away from hard liquor licenses for Zamu’s Place even though, anyone with a shred of brain left over from even a Zombie Apocalypse will tell you that liquor means get rich quicker. They’ve stayed away from that license because they know that they will lose something quite valuable in what Zamu’s Place will then come to represent for their loyal customers but far more importantly, they know what people guzzling hard daaru at their restaurant will come to represent for themselves. In this day and age, of people stooping all the time to conquer, that was just about the most brilliant thing that was served up on that warm day.
So anyway, we get seated and we’re soon joined by Niharika and Murad Cursetjee, who along with Zal Cursetjee, creator of a few magnificent dishes at ZP (also hoster of great pub quizzes and cockblocker of Pranav’s eagerness to answer at these aforementioned pub quizzes), are the owners of this fine establishment. We were a bit concerned about Murad because he came in all serious with nearly a scowl on his face, almost as if he wasn’t convinced of who the hell we were [and rightly so because who the hell are we? (not speaking existentially, of course)] and why he needed to step out in that godawful sun to meet us. We did empathize because it was fucking hot and we were glad for the beers that soon made their way out to the table. Eventually Murad relaxed, as did everyone, but not before he told us, with a glint that was a mixture of pride and affection about some of the history of Zamu’s Place including how this place started in 1988 and how they still retained some of the original menu with some of the classics, like the shashliks, the garlic mushrooms, the pork chops and that monstrous thing of eclectic meaty beauty called the Mixed Grill.
With Murad now in his element, we were soon having the conversations we wanted to have with Niharika and him including the one which spoke about the new sort of entitled guest that comes to restaurants as if God himself came down, and around a burning bush, ordained this new guest to go forth to restaurants with commandments to correct their ways or face the food prophet’s wrath on Zomato, or on food groups. The way they handle this sort, if you might like to know, is with some of the famous Parsi humor where they try and accommodate the guest as best as they can but if someone is being a grade A asshole, they read the riot act to him. We, also spoke, intermittently, about ZP’s future plans and Abbas noticed Niharika was handling this bit of the conversation, and we wondered at a later time, if she was bringing some North-East Indian (she hails from Assam even though she insists that she’s from everywhere) fire to the table through Bhoot Jholokia, that little bit of chilli that has in literal and in post meal terms set fire to the Puneri restaurant scene.
We’re now ordering the starters and because it was Pranav’s first time at Zamu’s Place, we order most of the classics. The no-brainer choices are the garlic mushrooms and the surf and turf inspired Bacon Wrapped Prawns. There’s also a deep fried beef starter which Niharika suggested we should get and who are we to take opposing ideological stands about deep fried beefness that the pretty owner of a restaurant is suggesting? The food came and it complemented the beer and the conversation and it was perfect. Starters, beer and conversation went on for an hour or so and we were reluctant when first reminded that we need to get around to the mains.
But herein began the fun, because the three of the elder sorts insisted that the Zamu’s Place debutant, Pranav get a sizzler since this was his first time. Like most stories revolving around people losing their virginities, things got awkward when Pranav, who wasn’t really in Sizzler mode, did a hotchpotch of his ordering so as to get pork ribs, mashed potatoes, grilled tomatoes and, hold your breath, noodles. The dead denizens of quite a few culinary cultures may have done some serious grave rolling by the time Pranav was done ordering. But in Pranav’s defence, he felt immensely pressurized. Almost on a mom-is-standing-right-behind-you-while-you-open-the-website-to-check-your-engineering-results level. Quite as expected, Pranav succumbs to panic and messes up the order in the same way you tell your mom that you passed all but one paper when the reality is quite the polar opposite.
Abbas, on the other hand, ordered the Scandinavian Beef Rolls because the summer heat had a gun to his head about ordering any form of sizzlers.
When the food arrived, it was as expected, glorious. First let’s talk about Pranav’s sizzler, because that should have been a disaster but as soon as we saw that big chunk of meat, we knew that the meat on that plate would be the equivalent of a Clint Eastwood in a film. It would not say much and it would sneer a lot, but by all the ancient Gods, it would be brilliant. The mashed potatoes looked adept at being mashed and being potato-ey and the noodles seemed as if there was an infusion of something Asian just to keep certain demographics happy and even though you knew it would be wrong in terms of combinations, how wrong can you really go with meat and potatoes and fucking noodles? Coming to Abbas’ end of things, his Scandinavian beef rolls were beautiful and although we were expecting something Viking in proportions, we were pleasantly surprised when we got actual rolls covered in a sauce that was just creamy magnificence. The meat under the sauce was not an afterthought in terms of cooking and consisted of a roll made of a beef mince that still had a little bit of the grit on it, which Abbas quite liked. Honestly though, that sauce could have quite literally have covered anything, even the sins of the world without batting an eyelid. The Scandinavian Beef Rolls also have within them, a bit of an inside joke to them, in the form of small slivers of Jalapeno peppers which give to the bite, an infusion of “What the fu…” simply because it is so pleasing in the nuanced change of flavor in the form of the lovely fresh tartness it imparts into the heaviness of the meat. Zal apparently is the guy responsible for this dish and mad props for churning out such a winner.
This restaurant is about the honesty of big, bold flavors that will grip you by the shoulders and shout in your face, “Keep your fucking flimflam delicate slicings of meat at home. This is not the place for it”. This is caveman style meat servings for people who love meat. This is why Zamu’s Place is important for Pune because after we are done with our new age dining and our molecular gastronomy and our amuse-bouches, we still need places where we can come back and practice the fine art of ripping beautifully cooked meat from bones with our hands, in a location that won’t eye roll and do the tch tch on you.
It would be hard to sit in Dhole Patil road and not talk about Vohuman because in Irani/Persian/Parsi terms, ZP and Vohuman are a bunch of contrasts. While people may mentally, textually and verbally jack off to the very utterance of, Vohuman, and claim that they had their best early morning foodgasms at this place and how important Vohuman is to the eating out fabric of Pune, it never really came across anywhere close to that because apart from the old man, it really had nothing going for it, and perhaps it is our failing that old men just do not do it for us.
Abbas: Zamu’s Place though has that almost ethereal quality to it which seems to make me love it more everytime I go there, because even though it is old, it doesn’t show its age and does not demand respect and importance as a result of just being antiquated. It seems to be quite comfortable as a modern restaurant too and it embraces modernity not with a scowl and foul language like the old tend to, but rather with a sense of sangfroid which is just so awesome.
Pranav: It’s almost as if Vohuman is Maanas Shah’s 200 Rupee Beer post while Zamu’s Place is the thousands of liters of beer drunk all over at more than MRP prices with nary a mention. Like Vohuman is the lead guitarist of a band while Zamu’s Place is the drummer. Like Vohuman is, if I may, Sachin Tendulkar while Zamu’s Place is Rahul Dravid.
Abbas: To me, therefore, it is such a mind fuck and a half that it doesn’t have the cultural currency for Pune that say a Vohuman or a Vaishali or a Goodluck has, because unlike these places, Zamu’s Place seems to have the wherewithal and the absence of arrogance needed to evolve to a new type of customer and a new type of age of dining.
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